


name the blood for the war between your legs (name it something holy)

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: wait 'til you meet my little sister [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (i mean i knew from experience but still), Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Asexual Character, Blood, Character Study, Female Klaus Hargreeves, Female Luther Hargreeves, Female Number Five, Gen, Gender Roles, Genderswap, Good Parent Grace Hargreeves, Lots of it, Menstruation, Puberty, Trans Diego Hargreeves, Trans Male Character, Trans Male Diego Hargreeves, alright this got a lot darker than I thought it would, especially if everyone's a girl, little girls are fucking hardcore, of sorts, puberty must suck if you're a hargreeves, turns out periods are terrifying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 13:08:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19377343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: When she starts to bleed, Four actually starts to question whether she herself is dying from the inside out, rotting like all of the corpses she's seen.Six is fucking terrified. The tentacles, the monsters- they were supposed to stay inside of her when she wasn't using them. The blood isn't supposed to stain when she's not on a mission. The blood isn't supposed to stay.Allison wonders if she can just rumor the period away.Lena doesn't like her period. She doesn't like the reminder that she's vulnerable, that she's weak, that she can bleed so much.Vanya is perhaps the only Hargreeves sister to actually feel relieved when she gets her period.Five is the last of the Hargreeves girls to get her period, and she gets hers about three months after she flashes into the Apocalypse.Diego never bleeds between his legs. He never grows breasts, never lets his hair grow out, never grows curves or wider hips. And that's a total relief. All of that- it's not what he wants. It's not what he is.(The story of how each of the six Hargreeves girls get their period, and how their brother doesn't.)





	name the blood for the war between your legs (name it something holy)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/gifts), [felinedetached](https://archiveofourown.org/users/felinedetached/gifts).
  * Inspired by [yay, sisters!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19189309) by [mayfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/pseuds/mayfriend). 



> Title is from "The Period Poem" by Dominique Christina, which everyone should search on Youtube and watch because it's the fucking best.
> 
> Alright, so this was inspired super heavily by mayfriend's work "yay, sisters!" and it most definitely would not have been written without it. Her notes explaining why imagining the Hargreeves sibs as all females would work are absolutely perfect and you all should definitely go and read her fic.
> 
> However, this is going to operate on just a couple of personal headcanons, such as Trans!Diego and the idea that the Hargreeves kids got to choose their own names rather than Grace giving them to them. Klaus named himself after the character from Series of Unfortunate Events, for example. So their names in this story won't just be direct female versions of the names, but female names that the Hargreeves would have chosen with the same motivation.
> 
> E.g.:  
> Allison named herself after Allison Janney  
> Vanya named herself from her favorite Russian name, where she thinks she was from  
> Diego named himself after he transitioned, picking a name from the culture he was born into  
> Benjamin named himself after the best of Joseph's brothers in the Old Testament, thus, female!Six names herself after Joseph's mother  
> Klaus named himself after Klaus Baudelair, thus, female!Four names herself after Violet  
> Luther named himself after Lex Luther, thus, female!One names herself after Lena Luther  
> Five never names himself, thus, female!Five doesn't either

_Etymologically, bless means to make bleed. In other words, blood speaks, that’s the message, stay with me. See, your daughters will teach you what all men must one day come to know, that women, made of moonlight magic and macabre, will make you know the blood. We’re going to get it all over the sheets and car seats, we’re going to do that. We’re going to introduce you to our insides, period, and if you are as unprepared as we sometimes are, it will get all over you and leave a forever stain._

_So to my daughter: Should any fool mishandle that wild geography of your body, how it rides a red running current like any good wolf or witch, well then just bleed, boo. Get that blood a biblical name, something of stone and mortar. Name it after Eve’s first rebellion in that garden, name it after the last little girl to have her genitals mutilated in Kinshasa, that was this morning._

_Name the blood something holy, something mighty, something unlanguageable, something in hieroglyphs, something that sounds like the end of the world. Name it for the war between your legs, and for the women who will not be nameless here. Just bleed anyhow, spill your impossible scripture all over the good furniture._

_Bleed, and bleed, and bleed on everything he loves, period._

**-Dominique Christina**

 

**First:**

**Violet**

Number Four is the first to get her period, and she gets it when they're still all numbers, not girls with names. She gets it when they are still tools, not daughters, nothing more than weapons and Reginald Hargreeves’ arsenal. 

When Number Four starts to bleed at age ten, she doesn't know what's going on. She doesn't know why so much blood, some of it thick and viscous and dark, some of it with tiny lumpy bits in it, is oozing from her crotch. She doesn't know why there is so fucking much, why it's so different than her other blood, why it feels like her insides are ripping out of her.

Four actually starts to question whether she herself is dying from the inside out, rotting like all of the corpses she's seen. She wonders if her powers don't stop with her just seeing the dead, but maybe her turning into the dead, into a rotting, bleeding corpse.

(She wonders if Dad was right to stick her into the mausoleum, if maybe she should have figured out how to control and push back her powers. If maybe this is her fault.)

Then Mom sees the blood on her underwear and sits her down, handing her a small blue-wrapped package. “You’re getting your period,” Mom explains, smile warm and welcoming and slightly reassuring. 

"My what?" Number Four asks, and Mom explains, using precise, science-sounding words to explain what a period and menstruation and eggs and uteruses are. She explains the tiny lumpy bits and the sheer volume of blood and why it's so thick and dark. She explains that this blood is how children are born, where babies come from, how new life is created.

Though the first few days of her period are terrifying, this is the day that Four learns to accept all the bloody bits of herself, starts to understand that it's not her fault that she is bloody and broken. She's not rotting- she's bleeding, a sign of life. She's surviving.

(Over the years, Violet's - as Four later names herself- balled-up pads find their way into the trash can in Reginald's bathroom. Her stained underwear, instead of going to the incinerator like Mom does to everyone else's, ends up in his laundry.

She bleeds on everything he cares about- which isn't much, as Reginald Hargreeves gives little to no shits about anything or anyone- until the day she leaves the house in order to chase a high that will take the ghosts away.) 

* * *

**Second:**

**Rachel**

Number Four hasn't really talked to any of her sisters about the blood between her legs when Number Six notices the blood between her own legs, and thus when the next of her sisters gets  _her_ period, she doesn't know what's happening.

-

At first, Number Six wonders if she missed some blood when showering after the last mission they all went on, if this is just some goon’s blood that a tentacle left in the wrong place. That’s happened before, after all- Number Six is used to having to go in for a second or even third shower to get rid of all of the disgusting blood.

But then she showers and showers and the first blood she found disappears, but then the rest keeps coming. She keeps finding it in her underwear, keeps staining her clothes, keeps getting  _everywhere_. The only thing that stops the blood from spreading is when Six stuffs a washcloth into her underwear, and even that causes blood to stain the washcloth instead of the underwear.

And Six is fucking terrified. The tentacles, the monsters- they were supposed to stay  _inside_ of her when she wasn't using them. The blood isn't supposed to stain when she's not on a mission. The blood isn't supposed to stay.

Then Four sees the bloody towel sitting on Number Six's sheets, underneath of her skirt, and she gives Six a small, reassuring smile that still doesn't stop Six from flinching. "I'm a freak," Six says, trying not to cry, because Father always says that they have to be strong. "The blood won't stop-"

Four sits down on the bed next to Six, picking up the washcloth and holding it not in disgust, but in understanding. "There's nothing wrong with you," Four says, voice firm, and though she refuses to wear a skirt and wears thick layers of black eyeliner around her eyes and has about five forbidden piercings on her ears, she reminds Six of nothing more than their mother. Four is comforting in a way that only Mom has ever been as she explains to Six what's going on with her body, how the blood doesn't make her a freak but just makes her a girl.

(Years later, when Rachel dies, Violet is there, waiting for her to come back. She is still there, ready to comfort Rachel, to show her that she is still okay. That there is still nothing wrong with her, even when she's dead. The blood on her chest, from the way she died, is still her own to claim.)

* * *

**Third:**

**Allison**

By the time Number Three- now Allison, who chose her name after an actress who had played one of the most powerful characters she’s ever seen a girl play on television- gets her period, she knows what it is. She knows that it’s natural, that every girl goes through it.

That doesn’t mean she has to _like_ it, though. Blood is icky.  _And_ unnecessary.

Allison already knows that she wants kids, someday, but not from her own body. She doesn't want sex, she knows that. She won't ever want it. So there's really no point to all this blood, if she doesn't want sex or biological children, right?

She wonders if she can just rumor the period away. She wonders if there’s some way to fix her body with her words, some way she can alter it so that she doesn't have to bleed anymore. She can still keep the boobs and the curves and nice voice that are coming with puberty- she likes those.

But the blood? That can go. That can go far, _far_ away and never return.

But her Rumor doesn't work on herself, and it can't stop biological functions. She can't make the blood stop, no matter how hard she tries, no matter how many times she speaks those supposedly magical words, so she's just going to have to deal with it.

* * *

**Fourth:**

**Lena**

Lena doesn't like her period. She doesn't like the reminder that she's vulnerable, that she's weak, that she can bleed so much.

The press already criticizes the Umbrella Academy for being mostly female, for being over emotional, for being too violent for the chromosomes sitting in their cells and the long hair cascading down their backs. They'd even assumed that Diego had to be their leader because he's the boy. Because that's what boys do. Because the tall girl standing proudly in the front, blond hair plaited back and not a scratch or pulled muscle on her despite the fact that she'd just chucked a man over a building, couldn't possibly be the leader of the Umbrella Academy.

(A few months later, when the media figures out that Diego is trans, that he used to be a girl, the mood switches back to criticizing the whole Academy for their perceived softness and weakness. Diego is dismissed as just a freak, as almost worst than the rest of them, and Lena almost feels sorry for her brother. Almost. But then Diego chucks another blade too close to her head in training and the media calls them all freakish for being too strong for girls and she loses all sympathy.)

Lena's too strong for a little girl. She's not a boy, not like Diego, she knows that, but she doesn't want to be as soft as the media thinks girls are. Lena's supposed to be a leader. She needs to be _seen_ as the leader. 

Therefore, Lena can't be weak. She can't be soft. She can't be vulnerable.

So the day Lena gets her first pad, she cuts her hair short. Mom goes in and tidies it up a bit later, but Lena wears her hair buzzed short until the day she dies.

She's still a girl. She's not like Diego- she's not a boy. The blood between her legs is hers, even if it shows her vulnerability. It also shows the war in her gut, the constant churning and fury that threatens to drown anyone who gets too close.

But these outward symbols of her weakness, of her femininity, of everything the world likes to criticize- they've got to go if she wants to be taken seriously as a leader. 

* * *

  **Fifth:**

**Vanya**

Vanya is perhaps the only Hargreeves sister to actually feel relieved when she gets her period.

This is something, some facet of her body, some bloody, disgusting thing, that she can share in common with her sisters. This is a biological sign that the war they carry on the outsides of their bodies, the violent battles they fight, aren't ones reserved just to those with powers.

Because she was one of those forty-three girls, too, birthed of those same bloody pools and bloody bathrooms and bloody gyms and bloody floors. This period, this blood- it’s how their mothers had them. This blood is what eventually birthed them, what created them alone. There was no sperm- there was only this pool inside of their mothers that led to all of the babies being born with two X chromosomes.

This blood- it's beautiful, in a violent, creative sort of way. It's her insides screaming to leave her, to cut themselves from her uterus, but it's also a sign. A symbol. A birth, of sorts.

(Vanya sleeps and she dreams of blood, and she feels comforted for the first time in years.)

* * *

**Sixth:**

**Five**

Five is the last of the Hargreeves girls to get her period, and she gets hers about three months after she flashes into the Apocalypse.

Of course this is going to happen now. Of course this is going to happen after the world ends, after her siblings are all dead, after Mom is gone and there is no one to explain to her how the fuck to clean this mess up. 

Oh, Five knows what the fuck is going on. She knows what a period is. She knows that this blood is natural. Though her sisters didn't mention much, she knows that the trash cans at their house would often fill up with green and blue and pink wrappers around that time of the month.

The exact intricacies, though- how to bleach blood from clothing, how to take care of the cramps, the exact meaning behind a period- that, she doesn't know, loathe as she is to admit ignorance.

So Five guesses that she should probably make it her mission to go find any sort of book in any sort of Library about menstruation and what she should expect, a package of pads somewhere, and some sort of pain killers. Because fuck her if she's going to be spending the next week both starving and in an incredible abdominal pain.

(And, to be honest, taking care of all of this is a great momentary distraction from the corpses of her sisters- and her brother- a few towns over, in the ruins of the mansion. The blood in her pants- she ditched the skirt her third day in the Apocalypse- is a way to not think about the blood crusted onto her family's faces.)

- 

When Five becomes an assasin forty years later, she already knows the intimacy of blood. She already knows what it's like to leave a litter trail of tiny wrappers stained in blood (a trail of death and things that will never grow) behind her as she goes.

Picking up that gun from the Handler isn't just a way to save her siblings- it's her coming home.

* * *

**~~Seventh~~ /Never: **

**Diego**

Number Two knows that he's not a girl, and he pretty much hates it. He hates the fact that he's unlike his sisters, the fact that they are all girls, like Mom, who is nice and kind and warm, and he is a boy, like Dad, who is nothing but hard and cold.

He doesn't want to be like Dad. He wants to be like Mom. He wants to be kind and warm and loving. But he  _is_ a boy, he knows it. He's not dresses and having babies and long hair and breasts. He's not soft curves and periods and higher voices.

So he tells Mom, scared shitless of what she'll say, how she'll tell him that there's something wrong with the way he's feeling, and-

“You’re my little boy,” Mom says with a smile that is more warm that it is robotic, and Number Two feels a little bit better with the fact that he's not like his sisters. He still feels guilty, still feels somewhat wrong, but he knows that Mom is on his side. The person he loves most loves him too.

Number Two starts on hormones the next day, and by the time that he hits puberty, Number Two the girl is now Diego the boy. He is the first of them to choose his name, the first Hargreeves child to give himself an identity of his own.

(And that means something, it really does. Being the first to choose something other than a number, being the first to stake a claim on something outside of what their father gave them- well, Diego clings to this, down the line.)

Diego's never going to need much of a binder, because the hormone blockers have taken care of all of that. He never bleeds between his legs. He never grows breasts, never lets his hair grow out, never grows curves or wider hips. And that's a total relief. All of that- it's not what he wants. It's not what he  _is_.

(But there's something in him that misses not being like his sisters. He's in the right body now, he knows, but he almost wishes that he'd been a normal girl like them. He almost wishes that he had been just another girl, just another daughter, had bled like them and grown like them. He doesn't belong in a way just like Vanya doesn't. There's something they all share, even Vanya, that he doesn't.)

-

When Diego leaves the house at age eighteen to join the police academy, he can almost breathe a sigh of relief. He's no longer living in a house that feels haunted by the ghost of his girlhood self, by the spectres of his remaining sisters (so not Allison, who left months before he did, or Violet, who disappeared to shoot up drugs a couple of years ago. Just Lena, who will never leave the Academy, Rachel, who wants to be a hero and save people despite her self-hatred, and Vanya, who he's sure is going to disappear out of that house some day soon anyway).

Instead, he's going to get to share an apartment with Patch while they're both in the Police Academy. It's going to be a lot easier to breathe there than at the mansion, as Patch is the first person other than Mom to accept Diego unconditionally. She introduces Diego to lots of things, like Disney movies and cooking shows and crime dramas, takes him drinking when they're old enough, and just altogether makes his life actually fun to live. 

For the first time in his life, Diego feels comfortable in his own skin. He is happy to be himself, to have the only blood be in police drills and on crime sites that they're taught at.

(Then he quits the Police Academy on the second to last day, and his relationship with Patch falls through, and then Rachel dies, and-

It starts to get hard to breathe again.)

 

_See, it’s possible that we know the world better because of the blood that visits some of us._

_It interrupts our favorite white skirts, and shows up at dinner parties unannounced; blood will do that, period._

_It will come when you are not prepared for it; blood does that, period._

_Blood is the biggest siren, and we understand that blood misbehaves- it does not wait for a hand signal, or a welcome sign above the door._

_And when you deal in blood over and over again like we do, when it keeps returning to you, well, that makes you a warrior._

**-Dominique Christina, _The Period Poem_**

 

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I'd like to write a sequel to this but I'm not sure if I will, as it feels like it might be infringing/messing with "yay, sisters" too much. Does anyone want a sequel? I plan to operate in a very different universe than mayfriend's, but if they seem to similiar and like I'm copying her ideas, stop me now. Please.


End file.
